As day turned to dusk on Capitol Hill, and all the cable-news cameras switched off, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse took to the Senate floor Wednesday in a dramatic appeal to decency, ostensibly throwing his support behind the #MeToo movement, and bashing Donald Trump, whom he claimed had ignored him when Sasse recommended he nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. “We all know that the president cannot lead us through this time. We know that he’s dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to divide us,” Sasse said, referring to Trump’s characteristically cruel attack on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. “His mockery of Dr. Ford last night in Mississippi was wrong, but it doesn’t really surprise anyone—it’s who he is.” At points in his speech, Sasse seemed to be attempting to hold back tears. “It was wrong when people insinuate that a woman bears blame for her sexual assault because she was drunk,” he said, with feeling. “This kind of repugnant nonsense creates excuses for abusers. I don’t want anyone telling those poisonous lies to my daughters.”

Of course, impassioned floor speeches are one thing—actually voting against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation is quite another. And when it comes to following through on his woke pronouncements and long-winded pleas for decency, Sasse doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record. Despite an upcoming book expected to denounce the polarization of the Trump era; a nonprofit that suggested he would launch a primary challenge to Trump; a speech slamming Trump for steel tariffs; and at least one tweet professing that he regularly mulls leaving the Republican Party, Sasse votes the Trumpian line about 87 percent of the time. Even his bold floor speech Wednesday night provided some wiggle room, should he find himself voting to confirm Trump’s SCOTUS pick. “This is not about choosing between believing our daughters and protecting our sons. That choice is false,” Sasse said, adding that the vote should not be considered a “proxy for the validation and validity of claims of sexual violence.” At another point, he said, “My view is that the #MeToo movement is going to make some mistakes, it’s going to have some excesses, but overall it’s been an important and a needed development.”

To outside observers, the gesture rang hollow. “He produces very little, but boy, does he have a lot of words,” noted center-right commentator turned #resistance hero Jennifer Rubin. “Words in tweets, in books and most recently on the floor of the apparently empty Senate chamber well past 9 P.M.,” which reached “no one other than the C-Span camera.”

Sasse’s public agonizing is symptomatic of the political no-man’s-land in which moderate Republicans have carved out a wretched existence in Trump’s Washington. He’s joined by the spinelessMarco Rubio (who on Thursday morning tweeted a barely relevant Bible verse rather than outright defend Kavanaugh); the waffling Bob Corker; and the consistently slippery Jeff Flake. Flake, in particular, has made a public show of grappling with the Kavanaugh nomination, briefly halting the vote by calling for a truncated F.B.I. investigation, and later telling reporters that he was “not troubled” by the fact that the bureau did not seek to interview Ford. “I wanted this pause, we’ve had this pause. We’ve had the professionals, the F.B.I., determine—given the scope that we gave them, current credible allegations—to go and do their review, which they’ve done,” Flake said on Thursday. “Thus far we’ve seen no new credible corroboration, no new corroboration at all.” Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not so consistently wishy-washy, but when it comes to Kavanaugh they’re in the same boat as Flake, initially standing firm, but ultimately seeming to cave along the usual party lines.

So, inevitably, will Sasse, a Hamlet Republican too feeble to speak with his vote—a moderate destined to drown in the era of Trump. “In a very weird way I respect Lindsey Graham more than Ben Sasse,” tweeted former House Intel aide Adam Blickstein. “At least Graham owns the crazy, while Sasse hides behind a very false exterior.”